A while ago Dane Young posted an excellent blogpost on the ITVCE site on how to create a load balanced multi-node Citrix StoreFront 2.0 server group with the Citrix NetScaler 10.1. You can find the blog post over here: http://blog.itvce.com/?p=4605

Coincidence or not I was working on a blog post on the same subject although I recorded the steps I took to create this setup where Dane used screendumps and a lot of text added to the screendumps and as I was cleaning up my laptop I found the recorded video’s and decided to upload them:

Installing StoreFront 2.0:

I downloaded the Citrix XenDesktop 7 files from the website, extracted them and installed them both of my web services (SF001 and SF002).

Configuring StoreFront 2.0:

After I logged on to the SF001 I did an initial configuration of StoreFront, as you can see I’m using HTTP here but HTTPS can be used too and is recommended by Citrix (but not used for this blogpost).

Join Server Group:

Server Groups were introduced with the launch of StoreFront, as much has been said about StoreFront 1.x the new release of StoreFront brings stability and scalebility. I’ve added the actions on SF001 to allow a server to be joined to the existing group and the actions on the SF002 to be added to this existing group.

Create DNS Record:

As I changed the base URL for StoreFront to something I want to loadbalance I had to add the DNS Record.

Configure Citrix NetScaler:

This speaks for itself, this is how you can configure the Citrix NetScaler to load balance HTTP traffic over two web servers.

Proof:

Here you can see the traffic is being load balanced over the Citrix NetScaler configuration to the two web servers running StoreFront.

Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is a Staff Solutions Architect for End User Computing at Nutanix. Kees has driven numerous Microsoft and Citrix, and RES infrastructures functional/technical designs, migrations, implementations engagements over the years.

hi Kees, storefront normally requires https, or the receiver does actually. i know one can bypass it, but im curious if your method would be much different i you did it with ssl/https. as a takeaway for people new to storefront i think it is a key point.

[…] A while ago Dane Young posted an excellent blogpost on the ITVCE site on how to create a load balanced multi-node Citrix StoreFront 2.0 server group with the Citrix NetScaler 10.1. You can find the blog post over here: http://blog.itvce.com/?p=4605 and I did a blogpost over here: Creating a Load Balanced Citrix StoreFront 2.0 Server Group with Citrix NetScaler 10.1 […]